But also because any improvement, or even stalling the descent, would be a huge boon for She chose Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer partly for personal reasons: It was the disease that killed her mother. To my mind, the counter-clockwise experiments aren’t so much about looking younger, but about being able to do stuff - becoming capable and independentĪgain. Is Langer at all worried that she’s encouraging an American obsession with youth and immortality - which may be unhealthy fixations themselves? Or is that why she chose a conditionĪs extreme as cancer for her next experiment? Namely, seeming healthier is more undeniably a good than seeming younger? If stress is just worry about “bad things” coming down the pike (or already arrived), then if you can learn not to be evaluative, to think of eventsĪs neither good nor bad but merely interesting to various degrees - boom. It’s also intriguing how she defuses stress. Doing it for a whole week seems impossible. It feels Buddhist - like pretendingĮveryone you meet is your mother. At the end of the week your experiences would be enhanced. That would motivate me to find some nicer way to think about you. Spend a whole week assuming your every thought can be read by others. Have you started to incorporate any of her techniques into your life?Īmong her little cognitive-behavioral experiments, I like this one: Pretend your thoughts are transparent. As for the “mediators and moderators” that are actually producing the results, what Ellen sometimes flippantly says is, “Who cares?” She’s more interested that you got better One researcher on a shoestring budget can’t do much more than get a conversation

To do science right, rigorously controlling all the variables, is expensive. In the original counter-clockwise study, she did want to have another control group of age-matched men who simply took a vacation, to see if it was maybe just the novelty of the setting that was the active agent. How has Langer discussed these concerns with you? In the comments, readers have expressed the concern that Langer’s experiment is difficult to replicate and that it is hard to isolate the cause of improvements from other factors, like a temporary vacation from one’s life, or the expectation of improvement. People won’t be convinced until it has been replicated under strictly controlled conditions. But she’s still pretty far out there on a limb with some of this work. Mind-bodyĮffects are a mainstream subject. The placebo effect is real, and powerful, and possibly getting stronger. Has the scientific community come to accept more unorthodox experiments?Įllen is still considered eccentric, but less so than even a decade ago - not because she has moved but because the world has. Now she publishes and is more established as a researcher. You write that Langer was hesitant to publish some of her early studies because the outcomes seemed implausible, even magical. She’sįun to be around, but she kind of wore me out. She’d surely agree with Einstein that not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. She’s anĪrtist - literally (she paints) and also in sensibility. There’s almost a narrative intelligence - if that’s a thing - that’s more obvious than her scientific intelligence. She speaks in the rhythms of one of those old borscht-belt comics - punch, punch, punch, It started to feel like a story.Ībout 20 seconds into a conversation with her, you know she’s different. She told me the story of her mother’s and grandmother’s afflictions. She’s been doing her thing for almost four decades, but I didn’t stumble across her until I was researching my book, What Makes Olga Run?Ī chapter of that book deals with human limits and the role of the mind therein. How did you first hear about Ellen Langer or grow interested in her research?Įllen must have been hiding in my blind spot. Grierson’s last article for the magazine was about Olga Kotelko, a 91-year-old track star, which became the basis for his book “What Makes Olga Run?” Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.

Counter clockwise langer